Our body has its own system to combat blood clots and a team of Danish scientists have found out how it works.

By: Kristian Sjøgren

Danish scientists have figured out how our body eliminates potentially lethal blood clots entirely on its own. The discovery could lead to better artificial blood vessel designs and better treatment of blood clots.

The scientists discovered that when blood vessels begin to clot, small cells in the vessels register the threat and begin to divide and rearrange themselves in patterns which widen the vessels and loosen up the clot.

“It will be interesting to exploit this mechanism in the treatment of blood clots or when people have been given artificial blood vessels," says associate professor Lene Broeng Oddershede, Niels Bohr Institute, University of Copenhagen, who is one of the scientists behind the new study recently published in Nature Communications.